was forced to trouble myself with "proofs," commentators, old writers, dreary philosophies, and multiform affairs, the glass vases, perpetually reminding me of Ilfracombe and Tenby, aggravated the oppression. The iodine of the sea-breezes had entered me. I felt that I had "suffered a sea-change" into something zoological and strange. Men came to look like molluscs; and their ways the ways of creatures in a larger rockpool. When forced to endure the conversation of some friend of the family, with well-waxed whiskers and imperturbable shirt-front, I caught myself speculating as to what sort of figure he would make in the vivarium -not always to his glorification. In a word, it was painfully evident that London wearied me, and that I was troubled in my mind. I had tasted of a new delight; and the hungry soul of man leaps on a new passion to master, or be mastered by it. "Chacun veut en sagesse ériger sa folie;" so says Boileau, and indeed I was willing enough to demonstrate to all recusants that my passion had a most rational basis. Meanwhile it was the torment of intellectual hunger; and I make it a rule always to satisfy hunger-on philosophical principles. If you don't content it, it will torment you; it obtrudes on work and duty, perplexing the one, and obstructing the other: it can't be starved into silence. Therefore give it "ample room and verge enough." When pastry-cooks hire new boys, they wisely permit an unrestricted glut of tarts. The young gluttons fall on, tooth and nail, and in a week are surfeited; whereas a stealthy and restricted appetite would have lasted them for years, much to the damage of the pastry-cook. In this philosophic forethought I resolved to give myself a glut of zoology, to let loose the reins of desire, and afterwards, if the fates so willed it, settle once more into a student of books, and writer thereof. It was really time. For seven long months I had been separated from the coast; and like the Cyclops of Euripides, I had grown weary of feeding on daily butcher's meat and game, just as stray mortals in the Strand; and smacked my lips at the prospect of man-beef. "I am quite sick of the wild mountain game; Of stags and lions I have gorged enough, March was already come, the equinoctial gales were near, and the Isles of Scilly beckoned like syrens The from their dangerous shores. weather was intensely unlike summer, the snow and hail freely falling; so that, on a first blush, there did seem a shadow of reason for the astonishment of friends, who looked upon departure at such a time, and for such a place, as indicating something like insanity. But great wits to madness nearly are allied, and this alliance with great wits will perhaps be granted to me. At any rate, there was method in the madness, for unless I reached the coast before the equinox, the passage would be more than usually perilous; and just after the equinox, as everybody knows, the spring-tides recede to greater depths, and offer the finest opportunities for rock-hunting: moreover, the gales at this period throw welcome treasures on the beach. The 15th of March, therefore, was the very latest date I could afford for departure; and on that day the journey began. Why the Isles of Scilly were obstinately selected, may not be so easily explained. I had a fixed idea on this point; no argument could make me swerve from it. The main attraction was doubtless lurking in my profound geographical ignorance, which invested these Isles with a mysterious halo. In days when ladies take pleasure-trips to Algiers, and reach it in four days, or run up the Nile, as formerly they scampered through France, any real bit of untravelled country necessarily creates This is Shelley's translation. The reader who has not quite forgotten his Greek may like to have the original: Ως ἔκπλεώς γε δαιτός εἶμ' ὀρεσκόου “Αλις λεόντων ἐστὶ μοι θοινωμόνῳ Ελάφων τε, χρόνιος δ' εἴμ ̓ ἀπ ̓ ανθρώπων βορᾶς. an interest; and for travellers, in the adventurous or pleasure-hunting sense, Scilly is as virgin ground as Timbuctoo. Vessels in abundance touch there; but who goes there? Indeed, on entering a shop to make a small purchase, the bland woman compassionately inquired whether I had been "driven by contrary winds" to this unfrequented spot; evidently never conceiving the possibility of a sane Englishman coming here. They are also difficult of access: 66 a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried." Ten days, owing to contrary winds, were consumed in getting here; and under the most favourable conjuncture of trains, coaches, and winds, three days would be the very shortest time required. This difficulty secured the place from the nuisance of "visitors." Moreover, I had an idea of its being a good spot for zoological research; and with these two advantages, I could afford to listen unmoved to the sarcastic questions pelted at me, such as: Can you get anything to eat there? Are the Islands inhabited? Do the people speak English? Are they civilised? Contrary winds, and what sailors call "dirty weather," detained me a week at Penzance, where I was stranded in a lodging-house, kept by a middle-aged Harpy, rearing a brood of young Harpies, and rendered all the more fierce in lodging-house instincts by her condition of widowhood, which, you may have observed, generally throws a woman on the naked ferocities of her nature. Were you ever in nautical lodgings? Do you remember their ornaments, "above all reach of art"-the cases of stuffed birds and fish, the shells on the mantelpiece, and the engravings irradiating the walls-a "Sailor's Departure," with whimpering wife and sentimental offspring; a "Sailor's Return," with joyous wife and capering juveniles? All these adorned my rooms, which were further adorned by a correct misrepresentation of the brig Triton, as she appeared entering an impossible harbour of Marseilles, flanked by a portrait of the defunct husband, master of the aforesaid brig, painted in the well-known style: a resplendent shirt-front with a head attached sternly inexpressive, on a mahogany background. The defunct mariner seemed blank with astonishment at my courage in coming to such a house-a ruin, not a lodging. Everything in it was afflicted with the rickets. The chair-backs creaked inharmonious threats, if you incautiously leaned against them. The fire-irons fell continually from their unstable rests. The bed-pole tumbled at my feet when I attempted to draw the curtain. The doors wouldn't shut. Even the tea-pot had a wobbly top, which resisted all closing. Nay-and this will surprise you-in the moral world I noticed a similar dilapidation. The discrepancies were painful. In the "bill," arrangements were made which showed great fiscal genius; and when a suggestion was offered that the remains of yesterday's fowl might serve for to-day's luncheon, a look of pained reproach passed over the widow's face, followed by a gulp, and a silence which was broken only by diversion of the dialogue into quite other directions—the look, the gulp, the silence expressed, as plainly as words, the mean opinion which the widow entertained of her victim. Low as her opinion had placed him before, it had not reached such depths as that; the request for a paltry remnant of fowl, indeed, was answerable only by profound silence. Thus it was answered. I never gazed upon that bird again. Weather-bound in such a placethe equinoctial gales hurrying onboxes corded, soul unquiet-you may imagine the alacrity with which I sprang out of bed the morning when a sailor came up from the packet to say that anchor was weighed, and we should start as soon as I could slip on my things. This was at six in the morning, and, by half-past, the Ariadne, formerly Lord Godolphin's yacht, but now the property of Captain Tregarthen, who runs it between Scilly and Penzance, as the mail and sole communication, left the harbour, and reached Scilly by one o'clock. This was on Thursday, 26th March 1857. A century ago, on the 25th May 1752, Borlase, the admirable antiquarian, whose Observations on the Ancient and Present State of the 672 New Sea-side Studies. * Scilly Islands was among my books, "We were In blustering March, to have got over occur. * Thanks to that most convenient, and, to all students, most valuable of institu tions, The London Library, which manifold experience causes me to urge every man of letters to join. The they not inevitably pass? And how As I said, the joyful tidings came * Not that any shadow of a drawback darkened the horizon; for what could little archipelago, such as Greek the heart desire more? Here was a rugged, picturesque, secure from all heroes might have lived in-bold, the assaults of idle watering-place frequenters,-lovely to the eye, full of promise to the mind, and health in every breeze. Ithaca was visibly opposite. sweetly audible. Here one might Homer's cadences were write epics finer than the Odyssey, had one but genius packed up in one's carpet-bag; and if the genius had been forgotten, left behind (by some strange oversight), at any rate there was the microscope and scalpel, with which one might follow in the tracks of the "stout Stagyrite," whom the world is now beginning to recognise among the greatest of its naturalists. Homer, or Aristotle? The modest choice lay there; and as Montaigne says "nous là quester une friande gloire à piper allons par le sot monde." (The sot monde being you, beloved reader.) number of the Scilly Isles, because, It is puzzling to determine the where the largest, St. Mary's, is on a scale of no greater magnitude than nine miles in circumference, it becomes a nice point to settle how small a patch of rock is to be reckoned as an island. There are some hundred, or hundred and twenty distinct islets; but of inhabited islands only six. The area in statute acres is 3560, and the population in 1851 was, according to the census, 2600 in 511 houses-the females predominating in the ratio of 1439 to 1162. The average of deaths is 16 in 1000; in other parts of England it is 23 in 1000, showing a decided hygienic superiority in favour of Scilly. Much arable land there is not, but an occasional upland smiles prosperity at you; and in the sheltered nooks of Holy Vale you are startled with the appearance of what almost looks like island no tree is discoverable-without a tree. In the other parts of the a lens. The lanes are formed of stone hedges, as in Devonshire and Cornwall; but these hedges are not, at *The reader who has not seen the furze in Devonshire and Cornwall can form but a faint idea of its rich colour and profusion. this early season, prodigal of ferns and wildflowers as they will be soon. Yet they have already abundant ornament. On the summit grows the furze, with its profuse bunches of gold; from the crevices peep the stone-crop, the leaves of the foxglove, pennywort, and a multitude of other wall-loving plants, dear to my eye, though unknown by name; already the dog-violet and celandine are gay with colour, and the lichens tint the stone with delicate pale greys or greens, deep orange, or bright gold. The grouping of the islands is very picturesque, forming several good Sounds, where vessels of great tonnage find secure anchorage, and give a pleasant aspect to the scene. Standing on any of the eminences, we gaze down upon the deep blue of the bays, the white sweep of sands, and rugged reefs, and purple masses of the opposite shores; the plaint of the sea-gull, who is floating overhead, being almost the only sound audible, except the never-ending symphony of the waters. As we ramble round the coast, the successive scenes of the unfolding panorama make us long to have the artist's power of transferring them to our sketch-book. The rocks are entirely of granite; and the huge wave-worn boulders, sudden pillars, and piles of broad ledges into which they have been disrupted, give endless variety to their forms. Sometimes they have a castellated aspect, as at "Giant's Castle," on the southern coast-a noble edifice of nature's cunning architecture. Beautiful are the outlines of its topmost grey shelving ledges, softened with shaggy palegreen Byssus-lichen-beautiful its huge rectangular masses of light warm brown, blackened here and there with the mysterious beginnings of life, and darkening downwards to the shining deep-brown reefs that jut from the Atlantic waves, which lift their curling masses of crystal greenness into momentary splendour, and then dash, and break, and whirl in milky eddies among the ever-passive rocks. Passive are they? Yes; and yet passivity itself is only a slower action, which escapes our notice. The rocks, too, are mutinous with change, could our eyes but follow it. They, too, grow, and change, and die, and give up their substance to the great All, returning whence they came. Changeless they seem, in contrast with the impatient waters; and yet with reluctant concession they give up their elements to the ambient air, and the confluent restlessness of water, gradually rounding off their angles, and softening their rugged asperities. Myste rious and beautiful law, which ordains that the stubborn skeleton shall take its moulding from the gentle pressure of the softer flesh, as the sterner asperities of life are moulded finally by tenderness and love. The Giant's Castle-indeed, the whole of this southern shore-has a character of drear magnificence and massive grandeur, given to it by the disposition of its piled-up boulders and towering altitudes, not to be anticipated from the size of the islands. The truth is, we are always impressed by relative, not absolute size. Rocks, many thousands of feet in height, have a stupendous aspect only in isolation; among others, of kindred girth and altitude, they produce no such towering impression. The eye takes its standard from the forms around. The subtle influence of proportion rouses emotions of the sublime, even on these small islands; emotions of gentler swell are raised by every creek and valley. The rambles are delicious. They want, indeed, the charm of Devonshire, with its wondrous lanes "Such nooks of valleys, lined with orchises, Fed full of noises by invisible streams." There are no rills and rivulets intersecting the land, no affluence of vege tation making it a miracle of beauty and of life; but the lanes have their charm, and to that charm I yielded myself. After my first walk had satisfied the first cravings, and set the mind at ease respecting the wisdom of my choice in choosing Scilly, I returned to my lodgings, unpacked the bookbox, arranged the working table with its necessary jars, bottles, dissecting implements, and microscope; and, resting from these labours, opened * AURORA LEIGH. |